2024
by Keith Thompson
In this thriller, an FBI agent and a former New York Police Department detective investigate a conspiracy to tamper with a presidential election.
In 2024, the United States is riven by partisan dispute, cleaved into two acrimonious and irreconcilable halves, a mutual contempt expressed in the presidential election pitting Democratic candidate Katie Crandall against Republican candidate Bob Lutz. The political left believes a Republican victory would replace democracy with fascism, while the political right interprets a Democratic victory as the death of American values. David Flynn had to take a job as a deputy sheriff in Hamilton County, Ohio, after being kicked off the NYPD for accidentally shooting a Black youth. He uncovers evidence of intentional voter fraud affecting the vote counts in the battleground states of Ohio and Georgia—interference that might have led to a tipping of the electoral scales to Crandall. Flynn teams up with beautiful FBI agent Marla Devereaux—with her “exotic almond-shaped eyes” and “cheekbones any aspiring fashion model would kill for”—to quietly investigate a crime that could send the nation spiraling into civil war. Thompson conjures a political drama as electrifying as it is plausible, one that illuminates the fragility of the electoral system as well as the nation’s fractured psyche. The deeper the pair digs, though, the more it seems like the fraud they’ve discovered is part of a deeper conspiracy, one that transcends internecine polarization. The relationship between Flynn and Devereaux is microcosmic of the country’s angry division at first—she expects him to be a “Trump-loving troglodyte”—as he’s a lifelong Republican, and she’s a liberal Black woman. Their eventual (and predictable) romantic entanglement seems to point toward the possibility of greater political harmony on the national stage: a hopeful note in Thompson’s otherwise bleak vision.
The plot is frantically paced—it has the feel of a cinematic thriller, packed with action and intrigue. Furthermore, the author keenly documents the ways in which a generally prosperous nation can still suffer badly under the weight of gathering division. Thompson’s writing style is the weakest aspect of the book—it is antiseptically bland. He occasionally indulges in a sort of condescending didacticism, one that purveys well-worn, obvious lessons. Here is Flynn’s turn at sermonizing: “A nation’s policies should be based on reality, however unpleasant or inconvenient, or those policies are doomed to fail. When the truth no longer matters, demagogues, opportunists, and ideologues are free to fill the void with whatever lies and false narratives serve their purpose—and that’s never good for a nation.” These preachy platitudes threaten to undermine the book as a whole, although luckily this sort of collapse is narrowly avoided. However, this is not the kind of political meditation one finds in a book like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004)—a brilliant work of historical hypothesis. Rather, Thompson offers a dramatic page-turner, an eventful (if uneven) thriller based on a thoroughly intelligent premise. If read in this light, this is an entertaining novel, and even a touch more than that.An enjoyable political thriller despite its flaws.